Leader of Mans [uDG 2011]

Leader of Mans is construction based rts-like game that is a bit difficult to place squarely in a single genre. Gameplay focuses around developing resources and constructing settlements, but Leader of Mans also directs you to explore your varied surroundings and overcome challenges in combat.

All of creation is at your fingertips. Your mans look to you for guidance. Lead them to greatness.

Construct buildings as your mans struggle with the challenges of life. Aid them against hostile animals and discovering mysterious ruins. Help your followers explore the world and sail from one island to another.

The game features an in-game tutorial, and there are some instructions also included in the readme. Please have fun with Leader of Mans, remember to vote, and send me any feedback you have! A special thanks to all members of the iDevGames community, working on Leader of Mans was a blast!

Andy, out of curiosity, how are you making your artwork? It's obviously some good pixel work there, but I've never really found a tool that I really liked for making artwork. I would imagine that you're building off of (or using the same) technique that you developed for making the sprites you used in Reclaimed, am I right?

In any event, looks really cool. I like your concept of reducing the UI chrome by simplifying the entire control scheme. It reminds me of what bigger studios tried a few years ago (the UX chrome purges of the LoTR:BFME title comes to mind).

I use photoshop for my stuff, but these are mostly ripped out of SNES games until I have a chance to replace them with something made by an artist.

The gameplay itself is still evolving. Although the current version is written to communicate with a server, it's in local-only mode.. so it runs a server just for the local client behind the scenes in a separate thread.

One of my goals for this year's contest is to keep the game very simple, and minimize the amount of UI in the game. I think the number of buttons and menus in Reclaimed turned off a lot of users. Even though the game had fantastic depth, most users didn't even play 5 minutes, and they never experienced the quests, unlocking new skills, etc.

At the moment, you can drag your guys over water to get to new islands. In the future you'll need to construct boats or bridges. All the art right now is placeholder art, and it will be replaced before release.

Yep, I definitely want to stick with pixel art, but more specifically the "big pixel" art style.

The terrain is dynamically generated and I use gradients and a noise map to give it a pixelated look. I'll probably adjust it to make random wave-like patterns in the water, and perhaps vary the sorts of noise that occurs in deserts vs. grasslands.

Yeah, Actraiser was fantastic! I'm actually thinking of taking the plot of the game somewhat in that direction- more of a traditional god game. It should add a lot to the feel of what's going on and provide some nice direction.

The villagers will be requesting assistance primarily meeting construction or exploration goals. From tutorial-esque "Guide us to creating a lumbermill", to "help us train soldiers to explore the castle on the other island"

Most of the day was spent removing the multiplayer component. As the single player component evolved, I found that the multiplayer part made less and less sense, and it was just slowing me down. Until today, all the features worked in single player and multiplayer, and communicating every little event was a pain.

Other than that the build is mostly just a bit of cleanup.

A huge thanks to everyone in IRC who helped test it tonight. I have a lot of great feedback which will make things easier to understand. There will be some control simplifications and some context sensitive highlighting and possible tool tips to clear things up. Thanks to kiwimark and skyhawk for that help. Thanks also to monodemono for performance testing it by gathering 3000+ bread and building several hundred tents.

Also thanks go out to Seth and Neil for talking me through some mechanics and nailing down a few more parts of the game. Seth also had a nice write up with lots of ideas, and he even drew me a bear! So expect an awesome bear attack in one of the upcoming builds!

Just tried it out. It's got a lot of promise! The background music stops or doesn't loop but you are probably aware of that. Can't wait to see some bear attack action. Also, does the fire in the water do anything?

Was personally hoping for something like "Isles of Mans", but "Leader of Mans" works better. Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to cancel building something, even though there is text that says to hit return to accept the construction.